Transformation from good to great companies often seems revolutionary and dramatic. The transformation is indeed an accumulation of long processes.
Although the end results look dramatic, a transformation from good to great never occurs only in one heroic action. The transformation is like moving a giant, heavy flywheel consistently in a long run. This process is a build-up process, step by step, until the flywheel movement reaches a momentum and finally results in a breakthrough.
Unlike a successful one, a bad, failing transformation take a different route. It forces to take a shortcut and jump to a breakthrough. It is full of fanfare, slogan, and heroic actions, but it is not focus and consistent. The result is a failure that needs to be mitigated, but the mitigation if often again full of fanfare, slogan, and heroic actions. The cycle is called the doom loop.
The successful transformation from good to great is the research conducted by Jim Collins and colleagues. Based on the research, they write a best-seller book, Good to Great. To read the summary, please follow the following links.
Good to Great (1)
Good to Great (2)
Good to Great (3)
Good to Great (4)
Good to Great (5)
Good to Great (6)
Good to Great (7)
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Good to Great
Good to Great (7)
Great companies do not follow the suit in acquiring new technology as other do it. They only use and apply technology on top of good and healthy businesses. Technology accelerators do mean that technology should match and support the concept of a great business. In other words, we should say here that technology cannot create great businesses, but it can take the role of a catalyst or accelerator.
Good to Great (6)
The fifth factor that makes good companies transform to great companies is a culture of discipline. It entails discipline people, a discipline concept, and discipline actions. Without a culture of discipline, a company has to add an unnecessary bureaucracy. Jim Collins moreover writes that a company’s bureaucracy is needed only if it has no culture of discipline. To develop a good culture, Collins and friends underline the importance of having the right people in the first place. Because it also entails a discipline concept, a culture of discipline needs a clear and simple – hedgehog – concept.
Discipline people (not tyrant) are the ones willing to spend more time and effort to gain better results. The discipline people then are able to run the business based on a discipline concept and are able to avoid other irrelevant businesses. In running a hedgehog business and avoiding other irrelevant ones, they act with discipline in mind.
Good to Great (5)
A great company has a clear and simple business concept. The concept should be as simple as a hedgehog’s strategy to prevent attacks from its enemy, a fox. A great company’s hedgehog concept comes from the answers to three questions. (a) Is it a business in which you can be the best in the world? (b) Is it a business that makes you on fire? (c) Is it a business that makes profit? The hedgehog concept requires your business to have positive (yes!) answers to the three all together. If your business fails in answering those three questions, do not do that business. Focus!
